J T Rogers is not new to British audiences. Anyone who saw his Rwanda-based The Overwhelming (2006, with Out of Joint and the NT) or Blood and Gifts (part of Nicholas Kent’s extraordinary and impressive survey of western involvement in Afghanistan – The Great Game in 2009) or the later Madagascar (at Theatre503 in 2010) will know that he’s a writer who lacks to tackle big political subjects.

With Oslo, he is confronting nothing less than the intransigent tragedy that is the Israel-Palestinian situation. In 1993, against all the odds, Israel, in the shape of its prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat shook hands and signed the Oslo Accords or Agreement on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton presiding.

But it was not the Americans who had manufactured this remarkable reconciling of oppositional forces and hatred. The journey to the White House lawn had come about as a result of behind-the-scenes, secret negotiations conducted by the Norwegians and in particular, a husband and wife team, Terje Rød Larsen and Mona Juul – he a sociologist and head of a research institute, she an official in the Foreign Ministry.

Oslo is the story of their contrivance and diplomacy to get to the two sides to even sit down the one with the other – implacable enemies, already steeped in decades of violence and bitterness – to work towards, on the one hand, an acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, and on the other, the acknowledgement of the PLO as legitimate spokesman for the Palestinian state’s right to exist.

As any story going behind-the-scenes of history, it gives audiences a thrilling and enthralling sense of being, for once, on the `inside’ of events. And Rogers keeps personalities and the narrative rattling along, the personal constantly clashing up against `big’ historical forces with cries of `we are going to change the world’ resounding round the auditorium.

But with clever sleight of hand, Rogers contrives that Mona in a very real and practical sense becomes the lynch-pin – the calming centre in this tumultuous storm exerting a restraining hand on a husband whose first instinct is to micro-manage and over-intervene.

And, in the end, in the most poignant moment of the evening although the aftermath shows the further tragedies befalling the architects of this momentous if temporary breakthrough (Rabin was assassinated, a second Palestinian intifada soon followed the Agreement), Larsen and Juul’s belief in the possibility of, one day, a solution being found and this being just the first step on the long road towards it, is the shining glory of their efforts and Rogers’ portrait of it.

In all senses it is an ensemble, team effort with each character richly filled out. But Stephens and Lydia Leonard aside, outstanding contributions are made by Peter Polycarpou as Ahmed Qurie, the Palestinian Foreign Minister – a hard negotiator but one prepared, despite his own misgivings, to go that extra mile.

He’s matched by Philip Arditti’s bumptious, volatile, and dangerous Israeli Uri Savir (Rogers’ sympathies, you have to feel, are rather more with the Palestinians than the Israelis), a deadly practical joker and exponent of the counter-bluff whose impersonation of Arafat – a high point – could have gone so easily wrong. And almost does.

Ultimately, in a scene reminiscent of Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods – another play about negotiation and political breakthroughs – Qurie and Savir come to a surprising realisation and discovery of common personal ground in the shape of their daughters sharing the same name, Maya. Larsen and Juul’s great insight was to realise just how politically useful the cultivation of the personal can become, when it comes to achieving strategic political ends.

Time and again, Rogers’ Oslo put this viewer also in mind of other secret negotiations that have eventually brought a kind of peace – the IRA and the British government’s Peace Agreement being the most domestically relevant one. Eventually jaw-jaw has to be the way forward. Will back-stairs, secret negotiations also eventually become the way to defuse the current holders of power in North Korea and Washington?

Only time will tell. In the meantime, Rogers’ Oslo remains a slightly bombastic, occasionally humorous but tension-filled and fascinating blueprint of dialogue through high level subterfuge and the use of `minor’ officials (two Israeli economic professors) to start identifying the human inside the enemy leading to that all important symbol, the hand-shake – the recognition of mutual respect.